


Homecoming

by CaitlynRose



Category: A Star is Born (2018)
Genre: Alternate Universe, Alternate Universe - Everyone Lives/Nobody Dies, Domestic Fluff, F/M, One Shot Collection, Romance
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-01-28
Updated: 2019-02-12
Packaged: 2019-10-17 23:28:51
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 4
Words: 3,078
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/17569967
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/CaitlynRose/pseuds/CaitlynRose
Summary: Ally and Jackson, coming home to one another. One shots.





	1. Chapter 1

On Monday evenings, he has AA, and so Ally is almost always home before him. 

There was a time when the idea of knowing someone else’s schedule, of them knowing his - the idea of wrapping his whole life so completely around another person’s in the way he’s done with Ally - would have seemed to Jackson completely unfathomable. From the day and hour he left his father’s house until the day and hour he picked Ally up from _her_ father’s house, he’d lived alone, and he honestly can’t remember ever having been especially unhappy about that fact.  

There are so many things, Jack realizes now, that he never missed before he had them. Little things, mostly - things it would never even have occurred to him that he could want, much less have. 

Of all the completely unexpected joys of living with another person (of living with her specifically), just this - just driving up to the house and seeing lights already on inside it - might actually be one of the sweetest.

When Jack gets inside, Ally has something frying noisily on a skillet, and she’s singing along absently to Fleetwood Mac on the record player. 

Hearing him come in, she doesn’t move from the stove but she turns her head to greet him.

“Hey, honey,” she calls. “I’m just doin' stir fry, is that okay?”

He grins. Whatever it is, it smells good.

“That’s perfect,” he replies, coming up behind her to kiss her, his arm looping around her waist.

And of course, in many ways, their lives could scarcely be described as traditional - in many way, Jack wouldn’t want them to be. He loves his rockstar nomad wife every single bit as much as he loves his domestic goddess. But certainly there are moments, like this one, when the two of them are so conventional as to be almost cliched, Jack thinks - almost comedic.    

“How was your meeting?” she asks, when their lips part.

“It was good,” he replies simply. Sometimes, he’ll offer up some details when he gets home - something about what he learned or how he’s feeling, maybe an anecdote about one of the other guys in the group - and sometimes not. It just depends on the day. There’s no rhyme or reason to it, and Ally never pushes.

True to form, she just smiles easily now. “Good. You wanna chop some peppers?”

And the truth is that at this precise moment, improbable as it might once have seemed, Jackson Maine cannot think of anything he wants to do more. 


	2. Chapter 2

“Jack?” she calls, as soon as she gets through the front door. 

Ally ditches her purse and coat on the kitchen counter and immediately sets about finding her husband. She’d seen his car parked out front so she knows he must be home, and she needs to talk to him. She’s needed, strongly, to talk to him for every single one of the last forty five minutes.

“Jackson?” she calls again, pacing through the house. "Where are you?”

At last, she finds him in the music room. 

"There you are,” she says. He’s sprawled on the couch, absently messing around with the acoustic guitar. He looks up, his expression seeming to brighten somehow at the sight of her.

“Jack,” she says urgently. “Jesus. You are never going to believe what I’ve just heard.”

“Well hey,” he drawls, about as relaxed as she is intense, and - as she’s sure was his intention - his response seems to get her out of her own head, just for a minute. She stops in her tracks and cracks a small smile, rolling her eyes a little.

“I’m sorry. Hi,” she says, perching on the arm of the couch beside him and reaching over to bring his face towards her. She kisses him on the mouth, lingering a little to make up for her lack of a proper greeting to start with. When she pulls away, she can taste his coffee on her lips.

“What’s up?” he asks then, setting the guitar aside.

“It’s my dad,” Ally says. “He has a girlfriend! Or," - she amends, a second later - “a woman he’s dating at least. He just told me.”

Immediately, a big, uncomplicated smile spreads across Jack’s face.

“That’s great!” he exclaims.

Ally just looks at him, all skepticism. 

“...Is it not?” he asks then, evidently nonplussed.

“I mean, it’s a surprise, that’s for fuckin’ sure!” she fires back fervently. “He hasn’t had a girlfriend for… I don’t know! Maybe never! He met her - get this -  _at the grocery store._ ”

She pauses for breath, but just barely. “I mean, how would that even happen?” she continues, her voice rising rhetorically. "What real person - not in a movie or whatever, a real person - meets someone to date at the grocery store?"

Jack just shrugs. “Hell if I know. What straight guy meets someone to date at a drag bar? People meet where they meet, I guess.” 

When he puts it that way, Ally can’t help but see her husband’s point - can’t help the ghost of a smile that appears on her lips, even - but still she lets out an exasperated little sigh.

He says nothing more, just slides an arm around her hips and leans into her, his head pressing against her side. Instinctively, she lifts her own arm up and around his shoulders. 

He’s trying to soothe her, she knows, and it’s working, even though she sort of doesn’t want it to. She’d kind of assumed that she’d come home, rant about this to Jackson and he’d rant right back at her, and together they would agree that the whole thing was crazy and obviously had to be stopped immediately. 

“So, I mean, you think this is just, like, _cool_?” she asks a minute later, her voice smaller now. "This woman could be anybody, Jackson.”

Ally winces. "She could be somebody who just wants to… fucking… get her picture taken with some famous people, you know what I’m sayin’?”

These considerations are no longer brand new to her, but she still finds it so painful to have to factor them in to her life - to her family’s lives - at all.

Jack shifts his weight off her a little, looking up at her tenderly. All of a sudden Ally has that sense she gets sometimes, where it just feels like he sees every single thing inside of her.

“So we’ll meet her,” he says simply. "Check her out.”

And it’s not really what he says but something about the way he says it - like,  _we can handle this_ \- that’s so familiar; such a comfort. She’s lost count now of the times that Jackson Maine has been this person for her - the one who pushes her and protects her at the same time.

“Dad wants us to come by the house for dinner next week apparently,” she admits then. “Like all of us - you, me and Annette. That’s her name. Annette.”

“Well okay then. That’s what we’ll do,” Jack replies easily. “She’s probably great. Or, y’know, fine at least. Your dad’s not dumb, Ally. I mean he’s crazy, obviously, but…”

He trails off jokingly, and they both laugh.

Truthfully, Ally can’t say she’s not still anxious about this situation. She can’t say she’s _happy_ about it, that’s for damn sure. But some of that hyper agitation, that sense of urgency, that she brought home with her not ten minutes ago does seem to have melted away. She feels a little lighter, somehow, a little less like a coiled spring.

She lifts her hand from Jackson’s shoulder, grabbing a fistful of his hair and mussing it up.

“Why d’you gotta make so much sense, huh?” she whines.

She’s smiling, though. He is too.


	3. Chapter 3

He’d stumbled onto a melody before he left - nothing much, just a few bars really.

By the time he’s back, though, his wife has worked it into something that feels rich and full, and the piano rings out all over the house. It stirs something in Jackson somehow, and he stops in his tracks for a few minutes just to listen, half-formed lyrics starting to come to his mind unbidden.

Once - years ago now - he and Ally had had a long conversation about songwriting. Neither of them could really say why they’d started to make up tunes, started to put words to those tunes, started to fumble their way around the piano or guitar. Certainly they’d neither of them had any particular encouragement from the people around them to do any of those things.

But slowly, for reasons unknown, they’d both begun, and then they’d kept going, until eventually, somehow, writing songs was just a thing that they did. It became an outlet. A place to put their feelings - the good, the bad, and the ugly. And for each of them, any song they’d ever written had been for themselves before it was for anybody else.

It probably wouldn’t be good, they'd agreed, to lose that - the sense of songwriting as an innately personal process. The last thing either wanted was for the other to feel constrained in any way, or to feel constantly watched and overheard; if one of them was working on something and wanted it to stay private, that had to be okay. 

They’d agreed all of that without hesitation, as Jack recalled, and it had seemed to him a very mature way to handle the whole thing. Very healthy. The sort of thing his therapist would be proud of.

It’s sort of funny to think of it now, though, because so far as he can tell, both he and Ally had then proceeded - entirely voluntarily - to share with one another most every single thing they’d written from that day to this. 

He makes his way to where she is in the den, and lingers in the doorway, brown bag in hand. Ally’s feet are bare at the piano pedals, and she's wearing dangly, dream-catchery-looking earrings that bob a little as she moves her body with the music. Those are, for whatever reason, the things that Jackson notices first. She looks youthful and uninhibited and happy, and he loves to see her this way.

She looks up at him when he arrives, raising her eyebrows in greeting.

“Whaddya think?” she asks, her fingers still moving fluidly across the keys.

“I love it,” he says simply and then - with a nod towards her hands - “I don’t know how you do that.”

When it comes to instruments, they’re sort of one another’s opposites really. Ally is the master of the piano - it’s an extension of her, almost, and she can make it do anything she wants it to with ease. Jackson, by contrast, is a little bit more hesitant, his melodies a little more rudimentary - about the same way Ally is with the guitar. “An amateur,” she calls herself, and he catches her looking at his fingers on the frets sometimes with an expression similar to the one he’s sure is on his own face now.

She smiles at him, letting the song come to a gentle end.

“What’d you get me?” she asks.

“What do you want it to be?”

“Mmm.” Ally scrunches up her face. “Just not the pad thai. Or the broccoli thing.”

And honestly, it is completely beyond Jackson why - if she has preferences, which (as it always emerges in exactly this sort of after-the-fact fashion) she clearly does - she always says “surprise me!” as he’s headed out the door.

Still, it’s not the time to rehash that particular discussion, because on this occasion it appears he has come up trumps. “Pa-Nang curry,” he declares triumphantly, as she clicks her teeth in approval.

“You’re a good man, Jackson Maine,” she says solemnly, but there's mischief in the expression on her face. “You wanna just eat in here?”

Jack nods. “Sounds good.”

When they have days like this - when it’s just the two of them at home (or three, including Charlie), messing around with songs that probably won’t ever leave these four walls - they pretty often forego the kitchen table and just spread out on the coffee table in the den instead. They kneel on the floor to eat, notepads and instruments and napkins and condiments all around them.

Ally gets up from the piano stool and comes over to take the brown bag from him, the hand that brushes casually against his chest a silent “thank you” for going to pick it up.

“Hey is there a pen around here someplace?” Jack asks then, as Ally starts to unpack styrofoam containers and lay them out. “I think I got some words for this thing.”

"Right there," Ally replies, gesturing to the shelf beside him. "You got some inspiration on the drive, huh?"

Jackson just smiles. Because really, it is so rarely the leaving this house that provides inspiration these days. It's the coming back to it.


	4. Chapter 4

It’s hot outside - it’s been so hot for weeks now - and Ally has never been more grateful for air conditioning. Charlie wisely elects to spend most of the day indoors too, save for a few lethargic hours under the shade of the big sycamore tree in the yard.

Jackson, on the other hand, barely seems to notice the heat. He still sleeps with the covers around him just like normal, and when Ally gets home in the mid-afternoon, he’s sitting out on the back deck without so much as the fan on. He looks cool as a goddamn cucumber.

“Hey,” she says, to catch his attention, and he looks up from his book.

She watches his expression shift a little somehow as he takes in her appearance. “Hey,” he replies. “You’re all fancy.”

Ally doesn’t respond, just settles herself on his lap without fanfare, looping her arm around his shoulders. She kicks off her high heels and flexes her feet, trying to ease the ache in them a little.

“How come?” Jack continues, his body seeming automatically to adapt to the presence of hers, one of his hands slipping around her waist, the other coming to rest on her thigh.

She raises an eyebrow. “I can’t clean up nice for my husband on a Tuesday?”

He smiles at that, and she does too, before adding, in the interests of full disclosure: “I had that charity…luncheon…benefit thingy.”

Jack looks at her entirely blankly.

“I told you about this seventeen times,” she says, and it’s probably only a slight exaggeration.

He frowns. “Is this the, uh…the women’s empowerment thing?”

“No, this was the mental health thing.”

Jack shrugs. “You’re just so fuckin’ charitable, baby, I can’t keep up.”

He’s grinning, and Ally can’t help but laugh herself. She pokes him playfully in his ribs.

“What’s the difference between a lunch and a luncheon anyhow?” he asks then.

“Beats me,” Ally admits. “Apart from, like, two grand,” she adds a second later, as an afterthought.

He raises an eyebrow in an unspoken question.

“We donated two thousand dollars to adolescent mental health organizations this afternoon,” she inform him, entirely matter-of-factly. “I did get a chicken caesar salad out of the deal, and a… I don’t know, I guess a cheesecake sorta thing? But I have to figure at least, like, nineteen hundred and fifty dollars goes to actually doing something useful.”

Jack doesn’t so much as bat an eyelid.

“Sounds good to me,” he replies easily, as Ally had known for sure that he would. Jackson Maine, while not by any means reckless with money, was not a guy who got any great joy from watching the numbers on a bank balance rise, and whatever she wants to spend their money on has always been just fine by him. In all the time they’ve been together - some periods of which he’s contributed more to their joint account than she has, and some periods of which the reverse has been true - Ally can’t remember ever once having argued about finances. Not even the time she bought the (now infamous) High Heeled Leopard Skin Boots.

They sit in silence for a few minutes, and she hugs Jack a little bit closer, leaning in absently to press a kiss to his temple. She’s had a long afternoon of talking to people, and so it feels like such a welcome respite (even in this fucking unbearable heat) just to be here with her husband in their own backyard, nothing but the sounds of hummingbirds and cicadas around them.

“It’s so hot,” she mutters then, apropos of nothing in particular. She’s kept up a pretty regular running commentary to this effect for weeks now and Jackson - she would have to give him his due - has pretty admirably managed to avoid telling her that she’s driving him crazy and/or boring him shitless.

“ _You’re_ so hot,” he replies this time, with a grin, and it’s so cheesy that Ally throws her head back, exploding with a sudden burst of laughter.

“If you mean, like, literally sweating, then yeah,” she jokes.

Jack says nothing, just smiles, shaking his head a little. He lets his gaze travel down her body and fall to her lap, and the two of them lapse into comfortable silence again.

His fingers trail along the hem of her dress, brushing against the bare skin just above her knees. “I like this,” he says gently, almost shyly.

He looks up at her then, looks right into her eyes. 

“Seriously. You’re beautiful.”

And these days, the truth is that Ally doesn’t much care whether she is or she isn’t, as long as he thinks so. At his words, at the look on his face, she feels something pool inside her like warm honey.

“ _You_ are,” she replies, and it pleases her, somehow, that Jackson isn’t the type of man to scoff at the adjective when it’s applied to him. He just keeps looking at her, that same soft expression in his eyes.

She leans in to him and they kiss languidly, their mouths opening against one another’s, heated but unhurried.

So often between them it feels like this, has _always_ felt like this - like when words aren’t enough, when even music isn’t enough, something elemental in their bodies just takes over. Blindly, Ally reaches for Jack’s hand, guiding it under her dress and up her thigh.

Like magic, everything else - every single other thing - in her day is gone now. He smells good and he tastes good and she _loves_ him, and she can think of nothing else.

**Author's Note:**

> Guys, seriously. I don't know how to quit Jackson and Ally. I could come up with a ton of these, if you want to read them (and if you do, let me know! I'm not above admitting that I'm pretty motivated by knowing that readers exist!).


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